Tag: writing help

As I know that most of you guys reading are fellow bloggers, today I thought I’d write another post with writing/blogging in mind!

Jack Bun-Bun is here to give you all of his editing advice

We’ve all found ourselves looking back on a post, (usually just after having pressed ‘publish’…) just to be confronted with annoying typos and missing/extra words that we swear weren’t there after our final scan through the post. Or even worse, having someone point out a really obvious mistake that you hadn’t noticed at all. It’s much easier to proof read someone else’s work than it is to check through your own, so today I’m sharing some tips that I’ve found and collected for how to proof read your own work!

Dissociate | The most important thing to do in order to be objective when re-reading and critiquing your own writing is to separate yourself from the fact that you know how the piece is supposed to read; which means we tend to not pick up on the little details. A quick way to go about this is by reading the piece backwards. It really can be as easy as starting with the last sentence and reading backwards, as that way our brains pick up on anything that doesn’t make complete sense.

Bring Your Words To Life | Again, doing something different with your work, that can be as simple and obvious as reading your work out loud, or printing it out, instead of just writing and rewriting, means that our mistakes are much more obvious.

Plan | I really should take my own advice on this one, but sometimes proof reading your own work can be a lot easier if you’re not proof reading on the same day. So planning and drafting posts ahead of time gives you a lot more opportunities to redraft and find errors.

Avoid Scanning | When we are faced with a mass of text, we very often tend to scan the piece as a whole, instead of actually taking the time to read the sentences as we would if someone else wrote them.

Those are the best tips I’ve found, let me know in the comments if you can think of any tips that work for you that I might have missed. I hope that these tips can help some of you out! I am by no means a professional; in fact, I have some very lovely editor/proof reader pals who usually find my errors and let me know about them, but hopefully these tips can help us all out!